Luke 1:26-38 "Let It Be" Scott Hoezee

Throughout the Bible, you read about certain people getting contacted directly by God or sometimes by an angel of God. In most such instances, the reason for the divine visit is that the person in question has been selected to play a special role in that long chain of events we now call "salvation history." It started with Noah but then happened also to people like Abram, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, the parents of people like Samuel and Samson, and all of the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the rest. This same pattern continues in the New Testament. Right off the bat in Luke's gospel first Zechariah and then Mary find themselves on the receiving end of a quite spectacular visit from the archangel Gabriel.

Now initially you might think that receiving such a visit would be like winning the Reader's Digest sweepstakes: what a great thing to have happen to you! Except that throughout Scripture the people whom God takes the time personally to visit generally get set up for a pretty difficult life. Mary is no exception. Gabriel's first word to her probably means less "Hello" and more something like "Rejoice! You have found favor in God's sight!" That is good news, but Mary will discover soon enough that being the mother of God's Messiah will not be easy. She'll spend many years worrying herself sick about the odd things that her son ends up doing and saying. Ultimately, of course, she'll watch him die horribly in a public spectacle just outside Jerusalem.

The salvation of this world did not come easily, and those who became key players in that redemption often found themselves very much in the thick of a titanic struggle between God and evil. Again, Mary is no exception. However, there is something about Mary's visit by God's messenger that is quite different. From Genesis forward, you find many narratives of women being informed by God that they would soon have a baby. In nearly every case, this is great news in that the women in question had thus far been unable to conceive--and in not a few such situations, the childless woman was well along in years and so had long since consigned her dream of having a child to the ash heap of her life.

As some of you know only too well, infertility is an exceedingly painful thing to experience. That has been true throughout history, although in biblical times the social stigma attached to a woman unable to have a baby made it even worse, if you can even imagine that. So when someone like Sarah or Hannah or Elizabeth find out that God is going to give them the gift of a child after all, the joy must have been unspeakable.

Those of us who know the Bible well are very familiar with this scenario. Biblical scholars call passages like Luke 1 "type scenes." As I have said before, a modern kind of "type scene" might be something like this: one evening while channel-surfing across your fifty or so cable TV stations, maybe you run across a movie already in progress. It's obviously a Western with two cowboys standing about thirty yards apart in the middle of a dusty street. Each man is glaring at the other, one hand slightly raised and angled toward his hip. Even if you have no idea what movie this is, just seeing that set-up immediately tells you that what is about to happen is an Old West-style shootout. You don't need to know what the movie's larger plot has been about: the boilerplate set-up of the scene conveys what you need to know--you even have a strong idea of what's next.

There are a number of similar type scenes in the Bible. For instance, if you run across a scene where a man meets a woman at a well, it probably means they will soon be getting engaged and then married. If you encounter a story in which someone is driven into the wilderness, you can assume that some new revelation from God will happen out there in the desert. And if an angel appears to a woman, what often comes next is the promise of a child.

Yet Luke 1 is different from other such stories in interesting, and also instructive, ways. Unlike all of the other women in the Bible for whom the announcement of a child is such incredible news, Mary has not been pining away for years to have a baby. She's not even ready to have a baby yet! She's still very young, having gained the physical ability to become pregnant in probably just the last year or so. Further, she's not married yet--like most girls of that era, her marriage had been pre-arranged by her parents long ago, so there was no question that she would be wed one day. But it hadn't happened yet.

So Gabriel's announcement of an impending pregnancy was not the answer to Mary's prayers. It did not solve a long-standing problem with fertility. In short, this simply was not the time for Mary to have a baby. But that is at least partly the point of this story: it's not about Mary's time or plans but is simply and solely about God's timing, God's plans, and God's work. God is intervening in this world, upsetting schedules and re-aligning lives because that's what it takes to get God's premiere work of redemption accomplished.

But in the wider biblical context, the things that make this scene different from the many other, similar scenes ought to give us pause. After all, go back to my movie illustration about the shoot-out: suppose you did run across a scene like that while zipping through your channels one evening. But then suppose that, just before you were going to click the remote for the next channel, you noticed that one of the two cowboys was dressed in pink and was reaching for not a gun but a daisy that he had tucked into his belt. My guess is that this would be enough to make you stop your channel-surfing long enough to see what in the world was going on here! There had to be a reason behind this change in an otherwise predictable set of cinematic circumstances.

Similarly in Luke 1: an angel visits someone to talk about having a baby. We've seen this before. But wait: she's a virgin. Of course she hasn't had a child yet, but accomplishing that hardly requires a miracle. Further, she's not like Sarah who was in her 80s or even cousin Elizabeth who also appears to have been close to retirement age: Mary's just entered puberty. Clearly, these changes in a traditional type scene signal that something quite new is taking place in Luke 1. Mary quite logically asks Gabriel, "How will this be since I am still a virgin?" But an equally good question to ask is, "Why will this be?" since Mary does not seem like a logical candidate for divine intervention on the fertility front.

Up until now in the Bible, God's assistance in pregnancy matters aimed to solve a problem. But here things have shifted enough to force us to ask just who it is who has the problem. Since Mary is not the one in a difficult situation, who is? Well, everybody else, including us. We are the ones in trouble. We are the ones alienated from God. The Child that God is going to somehow implant into Mary's womb is going to change the world by solving our great big problem with sin. In this part of Luke 1, the main item is not what God is doing for Mary but what God is doing for all of us through the Child Mary will birth.

Today we open the Advent season once again, and as we do so, we quite properly come to the Lord's table. Doing so frames Advent for us, it sets the tone. After all, what does Christmas mean? Well, to some folks in our world what Christmas is all about is bringing people together again, especially those who have maybe become estranged for some reason. Most of the better-known holiday movies climax when the mom and dad who had been fighting get back together again and so avoid divorce. Scrooge wakes up a changed man, the Grinch's heart grows larger and more loving, the whole town comes together to save George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, and the next-door neighbor re-establishes contact with his estranged son at the end of Home Alone. Christmas is a time to focus on the other people around you. This month the New York Times will print somewhere on just about every page the phrase "Remember the Neediest!" to bolster holiday giving to charities.

So we start to think after a while that a "good Christmas" means being a little nicer than usual, maybe patching up broken relationships, digging a little deeper into our pockets to chip in to a charity or two, and just generally getting along with everyone so as not to spoil anyone's holiday cheer. "Peace on earth" may or may not be achievable in any literal sense, so we'll settle for the "peace" of not having Uncle Charlie and cousin Bernice argue about women's rights at the Christmas dinner table like happened last year. We're not really looking to change the world: we'll just settle for getting along with reasonable happiness and tranquility until January 2 arrives and we can get back to normal again.

In other words, we make Christmas about us, about solving our problems, about finding ways to handle this or that difficulty in our family's dynamics. At least some such concerns are not bad things to think about, they're just nowhere near the core of Advent. The Lord's Supper is at that core, however. In a season that celebrates a birth, the gospel insists we think about a death. Like Gabriel's announcement to Mary, so with this supper: we maybe didn't think we needed this just now. We've got other things on our minds this busy, hectic month. We've got plans for fun parties--festive gatherings that would only get clouded by too much talk of death. For at least some people, seeing a table of death and sacrifice, of body and blood, standing alongside the Christmas tree would be like seeing a cowboy wearing pink: this just doesn't fit the way we picture a traditional Christmas scene.

But Christmas isn't first of all about our agenda. As with Mary, so with us: God brings us what he knows we need. This morning through this sacrament, God intervenes in also our lives to remind us that what Advent is about is the defeat of sin, evil, and death. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus ask us to celebrate his birthday. Two of the four gospels don't even mention Jesus' birth. But everywhere Jesus and the apostles command us to celebrate Jesus' death--to eat this bread and drink this cup . . . until he comes.

Mary didn't think she needed a baby. It wasn't time for such a thing in her life. Of all the people in the world who could use a little divine help on the conception front, Mary wasn't one of them. God had other ideas. To the wider world, December 2 and the month that began yesterday likewise doesn't seem like it's the time to ponder the deathly demise of that wee baby in the manger.

We don't need talk of death just now--indeed, we pity those whose Christmastime is clouded by death (and in the wake of September 11, we are bound to see lots of news stories this month about the thousands of families whose Christmas this year will be very cloudy indeed). I once saw a television show about some doctors who falsified the date on a death certificate by moving a man's last breath forward fifteen minutes from 11:50 PM on December 25 to 12:05 AM on December 26. Why? Because, the doctors reasoned, this man's family shouldn't in future years have to recall Christmas as the day their loved one died. We don't need death at the holidays. It just makes things more complicated.

Yet this morning I would suggest that this holy supper needs to sound the keynote for the next four weeks. Because in a gospel context we know that if the boy child of Mary did not die in precisely the sacrifice depicted at this table, then we've no business bothering with this thing called Advent and Christmas. If it's not true that our very life is nourished by taking to ourselves these signs and seals of the sacrificed body of Jesus, then we may as well eat Christmas cookies for all the good it will do us.

We've thought this morning about what makes the scene of Gabriel's visit to Mary different from similar scenes in the Bible. The last detail in this passage that is strikingly different is that Mary gets to have the last word. When God or his angels visit someone, it is usually the divine party that rounds out the encounter with a parting phrase. But not here. This time Mary gets to talk last. Maybe the reason is because of her remarkable acceptance of what Gabriel said. This was not something Mary had been hoping for nor was it something that made a lot of sense in any wider scheme of things Mary could imagine. But contradictions and cross-currents aside, it apparently was what God wanted.

So she accepted it. "Let it be," Mary said. Today and always, as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we likewise need to accept what God shows us is necessary. Perhaps it needs to interrupt our lives, re-orient our Christmas perspectives, and maybe even temper with gospel soberness the exuberance of holiday cheer everyone seems to think they need to crank up during December. Advent is serious business aiming to solve our world's deadly enslavement to sin. Of all the stuff we eat this month, think about this month, sing about this month, maybe the death of Jesus doesn't always assume a very high profile for us. But God has come to tell us that this is what we need. If so, then our last word needs to echo Mary: let it be. Amen.